Iain M. Banks, “Inversions” (1998)

I bought Inversions from Methven’s Bookshop (remember them?) in 1998 when it came out; £16.99 which-was-a-lot-of-money-back-then, signed by the author no less. I have no strong memory of reading it; as far as I can recall I was underwhelmed. But re-reading it recently was a much more positive experience. In short: I thoroughly enjoyed this novel: a tight, involving narrative of two intertwined court-intrigues, inventive, menacing and, especially towards the end, genuinely tense.

It’s a Culture novel that’s not about the Culture, a few coyly cryptic references aside, the story makes no explicit reference to the Culture at all. Instead we get two connected narrative strands, both set in a sort-of late-medieval sort-of early Renaissance world. Part of our story takes place in Tassasen, where the old king has been deposed by the ‘Protector’, General UrLeyn, a sort of orientalised Cromwell complete with enormous harem. The main character here is the reserved bodyguard DeWar. DeWar — huh! — what is he good for? Well for a number of things, in fact, including preserving the General’s life from assassination attempts. To protect his master, DeWar sticks close to the General. He is with Urleyn in the evening. He is with Urleyn late in the morning. He is with Urleyn early in the morning. Surely this latter time is the relevant one, in the event is Urleyn attacked by the drunken sailor, what will he do with the drunken sailor, what … look, this isn’t just a cheap gag, you know. There actually is a drunken sailor (well, a drugged-up admiral) who tries to kill Urleyn with a dagger. DeWar foils this dastardly plot. Other assassins come crashing in Tassasen. In diverse fashion. Then the country is drawn into a debilitating border war, the Protector’s son falls ill, things start to fall apart. The Mysterious Figure behind it all is a genuine surprise.

All this is interleaved, chapter by chapter, with a second storyline set in the kingdom of Haspidus: narrated by Oelph, perhaps so named because the vicar at the christening was unfortunately punched in the stomach whilst dipping him in the font. Or, perhaps — since this world is without Christianity, christenings or fonts — not. Oelph is the assistant to a doctor called Vosill, a woman; which fact is remarkable in the institutionally sexist and misogynist society of Haspidus. Vosill is the king’s own physician, possessed of preternatural common sense about infection, hygiene, diet and rest, although not otherwise supplied with advanced pharmaceuticals. The DeWar storyline is good, but this Vosill one is much better, properly suspenseful. Young Oelph himself is more or less in love with the handsome doctor, but also serves a mysterious ‘master’, reporting back to him like Pascali in Unsworth’s fine Pascali’s Island (1980), a novel of which I was several times reminded whilst I read Inversions. King Quience, a sort of young-Henry-VIII, is surrounded by a convincingly drawn set of schemingly unpleasant aristocrats, and Banks also has space to touch on the lives of the peasants outwith the palace. Banks is particularly good on the resentment Vosill inspires in the breasts of the (male) courtiers, precisely because she is so valued by the king. There are various murders. Lords and nobles scheme against Vosill, and the story gets genuinely tense as her inevitable downfall, to be accompanied by torture and rape, comes ever closer.

Of course, what’s hidden in plain view is that DeWar and Vosill are citizens from the Culture sojourning on this world as undercover Special Circumstances operatives. This gives the twin narratives a secondary level of resonance. Indeed, without this second level the novel would feel like an underfilled balloon. DeWar entertains the Protector’s children with stories about a magical utopia called ‘Lavishia’ where everybody has what they want, and which would be rather dull stories if we didn’t know he was actually talking about the (in the logic of the novel) actual realm of the Culture. The Lavishia stories fill several chapters of the less eventful, and less consequent, DeWar narrative; and one — about two cousins, a boy and a girl, who grow up and have various adventures — clearly fill us in at second hand with the backstory of DeWar and Vosill (‘Hiliti’ and ‘Sechroom’ are their Culture names).

They were the best of friends but they disagreed on many things. One of the most important things they disagreed about was what to do when Lavishia chanced upon one of those tribes of poor people. Was it better to leave them alone or was it better to try and make life better for them? Even if you decided it was the right thing to do to make life better for them, which way did you do this? Did you say, Come and join us and be like us? Did you say, give up all your own ways of doing things, the gods that you worship, the beliefs which you hold most dear? [90]

So, yes, Inversions is actually another Banks should-they-shouldn’t-they Culture intervention novel; which is to say, it is another one of his should-we-shouldn’t-we Western Liberal Democracy problem books. And, inevitably, we are interpellated into the story as Culture-y. The Culture shapes our readerly experience. When Vosill shows Oelph a blunt, pitted old metal dagger, we know what it actually is without being told.The medieval world has its appeal, especially since we spend most of the novel amongst the very richest and most powerful; but mostly it’s horrible. We might want to holiday there, especially with protection; but we wouldn’t want to live there.

It reminds me — if you’ll indulge me — of a particular question to do with Romantic Irony. Now, I have a high regard for Irony, aesthetically speaking; and, more, I consider it a crucial artistic feature of modernity. It acquires a significant momentum in Romantic and post-Romantic culture (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and all that), but I’ve often thought I should write a book about a particular two-horned manifestation of it in the Romantic novel. On the one hand: Jane Austen. On the other: Walter Scott. Now, we don’t often think of Scott as a particularly ironic writer — he does foresquare, slightly prosy historical adventure stories, in which a ‘wavering’ character (hence: The Waverley Novels) is positioned at some Big Historical Pivot Time: the Crusades; the English Civil War; the Jacobite Rebellion. There is peril, questing, there are battles and duels, and there is lots and lots of local colour and vividness. And Scott was hugely influential — it is hard, indeed, to overstate just how influential he was in the 19th-Century, worldwide; and therefore how large a part he played in the evolution of the novel. There’s a reason that description — character caught up in big events, questing/fighting/adventure, lots of local colour — describes a hefty proportion of all the Space Opera and Adventure SF written.

Now only a fool would deny that Scott, despite his many excellences, lacks the sophistication and maturity of Austen as a writer. To read his books after reading Austen is to be struck by a kind of coarseness and flatness. Austen writes stories not about improbable adventures but about the probable dilemmas of everyday life, stories all readers can test against their own experience. But that’s not the crucial thing. It’s not that Austen writes about falling in love and marrying with sensitivity and charm — of course, that’s exactly what she does do; but there’s more to it than that. It’s that she is one of the first creative artists in the world to understand characterisation in ironic terms. Emma Woodhouse simultaneously is handsome, clever and rich and a short-sighted, rather spoilt young woman. The glory of Emma as a novel is the way Austen expertly, beautifully traces her growth in self-knowledge and maturity, correlating it to her awareness of whom it is she really loves. ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged …’ is a very clever sentence; because it both is and isn’t true — isn’t because not all men see marriage as central to life as Austen’s women, and is because love is much more important and resonant than questing/fighting/adventuring — and in the world of Austen’s novel this truth acquires a universality that derives by definition from the parameters of her art.

Scott has no characters like this. His heroes are heroic all the way through; his villains similarly villainous. They stalk about their stage-sets acting entirely in character from start to finish. The Waverley novels construe a WYSIWYG universe of reassuring moral absolutes. And yet, and yet: there is something in Scott that responded to the change in the times. He lacked the technical skill to portray the ironies of individual subjectivity the way Austen could, in part because his approach to character was wholly externalised. But in some of his novels he found a way of apprehending something that approaches Austenian doubleness of character anyway.

I’ll give you an example of what I mean. In The Talisman (1825) noble characters are constantly gadding about in disguise. King Richard Coeur-de-lion goes disguised as a slave. When King Richard falls sick he is attended, and healed, by an Arab physician called El Hakim. At the end of the novel we discover that this physician was actually Sultan Saladin himself, Richard’s enemy, all along. All this disguise gubbins is Scott’s way of intimating that a character like Saladin might be both the enemy of Christendom and an honourable, gallant individual at the same time. It’s a device that externalises what happens more naturally, and more persuasively, as interiorised characterisation in Austen’s novels.

To come, eventually, back on topic: this Scotty variety is the kind of irony Banks employs in Inversions. We read his account of sort-of late-medieval sort-of early Renaissance people with pleasure, as we might read George R R Martin, for the local colour and the ‘wouldn’t-it-secretly-be-fun-to-escape-civilisation-and-its-restraints’ brutality and sex. Whilst doing this, we also read about Richard Lionheart, and Saladin — or Vosill and DeWar — and clock their secret identities. Austen’s irony is more sophisticated, and has had a greater influence on ‘the literary novel’ (whatever that is). But Scott’s works too, though, in its way; and is more in evidence in popular narrative.

Anyhow, the summary judgment: there’s a focus to this novel, a narrative efficiency, that makes its simple storyline work really well. Banks uses his doubling device as a rudimentary way of adding nuance and complexity; and, again, it works. If anything it could be a little tauter. Several chapters add literally nothing (chapters 14 and 16 struck me as supernumerary); and there’s a slackening of interest roughly around the pages 200-to-250 mark. But this is not a novel that has been bloated, as several 21st-century Culture novels seem to have been, and it feels all the better for it.